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Developers spend a lot of time and effort porting applications to Windows in the vain hope that people will move to an alternative platform, and what happens? People continue to sit on Windows and use the same applications.

I'd say thats a good achievement, at least they are using an open source application.

Besides if a time comes when all the user needs is open source applications, it makes leaving windows all that much easier.

Edited 2007-01-08 22:52

Besides if a time comes when all the user needs is open source applications, it makes leaving windows all that much easier.

No it doesn't. At that point it is easier for someone to stay with Windows because they have all the applications they need. It has achieved nothing.

@segedunum

No they're not. They're banking on Microsoft Office.

The edit button was greyed out before I could put the word Linux in that phrase.

But the corporate desktop? Not even Open Office is denting that sadly.

That's partly because there are no companies left that are good at pushing desktop corporate software. Novell has no experience on the corporate desktop. It's starting from scratch. IBM could do it but it's out of the game (server only now).

Your comment exemplifies why I think porting Unix and Linux applications to Windows is an absolute waste of everyone's time and effort.

You're putting words into my mouth. It says like it written and that's it. There's no hidden agenda in there.

Developers spend a lot of time and effort porting applications to Windows in the vain hope that people will move to an alternative platform, and what happens? People continue to sit on Windows and use the same applications.

No they don't. They use what's good like VLC.

IMO KOffice and Kontact would make very good candidates/apps to push towards Windows users. Properly hyped, Konqueror could even trump the mighty Firefox.

Frankly, I don't expect much from KDE4 in the form of attracting users to another platform/OS. KDE devs aren't good at hyping their toys like the Mac folks.

> IMO KOffice and Kontact would make very good
> candidates/apps to push towards Windows users.

i agree but perhaps for different reasons than you.

koffice and kontact are both ways to spread cross-platfor, open standards. koffice for odf and kontact for "things that aren't exchange but do groupware"

> Properly hyped, Konqueror could even trump the
> mighty Firefox.

the khtml part of it is indeed the more interesting bit for several reasons, all of which stem from the fact that it is easily portable and easily embedable.

this is making it attractive for many projects ranging from safari to adobe apollo to nokia's handsets to ... with kde4 it will be easier than ever to access and use an embeddable khtml component across platforms (bye-bye ie component?).

bewteen these various products khtml could quickly hit market share numbers that are quite impressive.

> Frankly, I don't expect much from KDE4 in the form
> of attracting users to another platform/OS. KDE
> devs aren't good at hyping their toys like the Mac
> folks.

a) the mac folks have multi-million dollar promotional budgets
b) compare kde's current promo to 5 years ago. extrapolate.

Developers spend a lot of time and effort porting applications to Windows in the vain hope that people will move to an alternative platform, and what happens? People continue to sit on Windows and use the same applications.

I agree that the work in porting to Windows is misguided if the application requires significant re-coding, it sort of dilutes the value of collaboration in the OSS model and becomes somewhat of a fork.

However, the (theoretical) advantage to the KDE4 approach is that the heavy lifting is pretty much done by Qt and the core libs as far as cross-platform capability.

So a project like KOffice could (theoretically) attract developers interested in the capabilities on Windows but by using the existing framework, ultimately contribute to the alternative platforms as well. The project becomes KOffice, not KOffice on Windows vs KOffice on *nix. By expanding the reach of the application, users on all platforms can (theoretically) benefit by drawing from greater exposure to potential developers. I do perhaps naively believe that there are developers working with Windows for pragmatic reasons that would still be interested in contributing to open software on Windows. The Qt/KDE4 approach can ease their ability to participate in a large-scale collaborative OSS project.

Of course, it really remains to be seen once the libs are released and people can assess what's really involved from a technical/developmental POV. But I do think there's no harm in expanding the reach of free software as long as the effort to port free software to closed platforms doesn't detract from the the support of free software on open platforms.

Still, I'll admit there's a lot of theoreticals involved in my probably idealistic view, and this is just my 2c...

However, the (theoretical) advantage to the KDE4 approach is that the heavy lifting is pretty much done by Qt and the core libs as far as cross-platform capability.

In theory yes, but you're missing the wider issue.

The KDE applications work very well because they are integrated and embedded in KDE's infrastructure, and that's where they work best. To make it work on Windows in an integrated way it will have to be ported to the Windows infrastructure for embedding COM objects in KOffice, clipboard etc. This is a huge amount of rather pointless work, because you can't just port KDE, you'll have to port the applications and KDE infrastructure and make it work well together with Windows.

I mean, what would be the point of simply porting the whole of KDE to Windows and running KDE on Windows rather than individual applications? You've gained nothing.

"Developers spend a lot of time and effort porting applications to Windows in the vain hope that people will move to an alternative platform, and what happens? People continue to sit on Windows and use the same applications."

For me it is the other way round:
Why should I continue using Windows, when all programs I want to use run on Linux?
Why should I invest in new Windows versions, when everything runs on Linux?

So for me using OSS on Windows that also runs on Linux is acutally a step away of Windows, especially because the time one needs to be comfortable with Linux is lower if most programs one uses work there.

So for me using OSS on Windows that also runs on Linux is acutally a step away of Windows

It isn't a step away from Windows. All that's happening is that you're bringing KDE and Linux to Windows so people don't feel the need to move.

You have to have something compelling to kick people over.

Developers spend a lot of time and effort porting applications to Windows in the vain hope that people will move to an alternative platform, and what happens? People continue to sit on Windows and use the same applications.

If they're porting in the hope that people will move to another platform, I agree. However, I think it is worthwhile to port just to get people to switch to alternative software. Take Firefox as an example. If it was a Linux only application, do you seriously think it would have caused people to switch from Windows -> Linux? Maybe a couple, but the mainstream would have just switched to Opera while IE6 was sucking it up and then (possibly) moved back to IE7 if they weren't happy. Instead, you now have millions of people using open source software and making a switch to Linux in the future more possible even if it is still unlikely.

you are conflating two separate issues:

1) spreading open standards
2) creating a long-term, sustainable environment for free software by creating a FOSS friendly stack from the kernel up.

firefox is an example that belongs in the first category. very few people have switched to linux because of it. many people on linux, bsd, etc are happy because firefox exists but that's for reasons related to standards, which is a subtly but importantly different thing.